THE ANTHRAX PROTEIN 191 



mitted the disease. It appears that Rayer published a short 

 note of this work in the Bull, de la Soc. de Biologic in 1850, 

 but we have not had access to this publication. Davaine's 

 own work was of the greatest value and shows great skill 

 for that time. Probably the most important experiments 

 that he made were those in which he demonstrated that 

 the blood of an animal sick with anthrax is not capable of 

 transmitting the disease to others unless it contains the 

 bacillus. It may be of interest to describe briefly the 

 experiments which led to the establishment of this fact. 

 Rabbit A was inoculated with anthrax blood. Forty-six 

 hours later, examination showed no bacilli in the blood of 



A. At that time twelve or fifteen drops of blood were 

 taken from the ear of this animal and injected into rabbit 



B. Nine hours later the blood of A was reexamined and 

 found to contain a large number of bacilli. This blood was 

 injected subcutaneously into rabbit C. One hour later 

 rabbit A died, and twenty hours later C died, while B 

 remained free from infection. Space will not permit us 

 to follow the literature of anthrax further, save those parts 

 that bear on the presence of a chemical poison. Pasteur, 

 De Barry, Koch, and others studied the morphology, life 

 history, and cultural characteristics of the bacillus, and in 

 this way founded the science of bacteriology. The reader 

 is referred for the theories of the action of this bacillus 

 to the works of Bollinger, 1 Szpilman, 2 Joffroy, 3 Touisant, 4 

 and Nencki. 5 



Investigations. In 1877 Pasteur and Joubert 6 filtered 

 anthrax cultures and the blood of animals sick of this 

 disease through porcelain, and injected the germ-free 

 filtrate into animals without inducing the disease, and 

 concluded, quite properly, that this bacillus does not 



1 Zur Path, des Milzbrandes, 1872. 



2 Zeitsch. f. phys. Chem., 1880, iv, 350. 



3 Compt. Rend. Soc. de Biol., 1873 and 1874. 



4 Comp. Rend, de 1'Acad., 1879. xci, 195; xciii, 163. 



5 Berichte d. deutsch. Chem. Gesellschaft, 1884, 2605. 



6 Comp. Rend, de 1'Acad., Ixxxiv, 905. 



